Colonizing Knowledge: Social Science and the Disciplinary (Re)Production of Knowledge

Reading recent accounts of the ‘state of the art’ in the study of Middle East politics, one might believe there was a politically and intellectually unprecedented state of crisis, particularly in Middle East Studies (MES). Such narratives are dominated by the theme that the supposedly new – if not necessarily brave – world since ‘9/11’ can ill-afford an antiquated intellectual sectarianism and political partisanship of which MES is apparently doubly culpable. To strike a blow in defense of freedom, scholars are asked to abandon such academic parochialism and converge upon a common ground which, through the adoption of Social Science’s objective methodologies, would not only produce policy-relevant scholarship in the ‘War on Terror’, but also end the narrow factionalism of traditional academia. By virtually universal agreement, interdisciplinarity – understood as enquiry across fields under the epistemic umbrella of Social Science – is the key to such a common ground. Academics are asked to commit to this cause, their silence or reluctance construed as tantamount to complicity with the ‘enemy ’. These claims, however, do not hold up to scrutiny: on closer inspection, these political and intellectual debates appear to be embedded into the very way in which Social Science is articulated as an intellectual enterprise. This chapter sketches some ways in which this articulation takes place. Methodologically, this analysis aims to retrieve the synchronic rules according to which the discourse around these issues operates (its ‘archaeology’) as well as its ‘genealogical’ dimension (Foucault 1992[1984]:11-12) exploring how it has been possible to produce and sustain this discourse on interdisciplinarity and on crisis. Thus, the specific construction of ‘interdisciplinarity’, the consequences of that formulation, and the persistence of both can be viewed as ‘principles of regularity’ in those discursive practices which produce a field’s intellectual history (Foucault 2002[1969]:191)